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This rich, erudite and imaginative collection of essays is testimony to the continued fecundity of gender studies and of Joan Wallach Scott’s work. Particularly striking is the authors’ reflexivity about gender analysis itself, as they continuously redraw and rethink analytic arcs and categories. This reflexive impulse, of course, is contoured by Scott’s own explicit commitment to critique as the intellectual trace of what was once widely promulgated on the left as “permanent revolution”—a practice perhaps better suited to the needs and possibilities of theoretical than political life. Striking as well is the extent to which these papers move toward and are moved by realms, problems, and fields of knowledge exceeding gender analytics. These include but are not limited to new lines of inquiry in phenomenology, new readings of Foucault, considerations of liberalism in postcolonial spaces, revisions of art historiography , projective identificatory readings of classical and contemporary humanisms , the problem of NGOification of gender reforms, questions about the mutability of Islam, concern with democratic imperialism, lurid melodramas of failed agency, the problem of imitative reification, eccentricity in the service of an economy of erotic normalcy, isolation of the aesthetic, reproducibility of the screen, and a dozen different angles on ethics. Especially exciting is the ease with which the papers traverse from gender and sexuality to these other thematics and fields of inquiry, passing through borders once gated and policed by the keepers both of gender studies and of other fields and disciplines , but now merrily unguarded, sometimes even unmarked. One particularly strong current in this collection is the matter of “thinking in time”—a phrase comprising the importance both of allowing historical Thinking inTime An Epilogue on Ethics and Politics W E N DY B R OWN Thinking inTime | 313 time to do the work of dissolving certain seeming impossibilities or contradictions and of apprehending the specificity of problematics constructed by particular historical discourses and times. It is within this current that I want to place two other recurring concerns in the volume—the strong preoccupation with ethics, and the anxiety about the co-optability of gender and sexual equality projects by forces that disingenuously appropriate them for nefarious ends, such as racism or empire. Briefly, I want to reflect on each in turn. Perhaps the turn to ethics by humanists, especially literary scholars, is only one long overdue. If, as Lionel Trilling famously declared, “Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness , possibility, complexity, and difficulty,” what more verdant pasture could there be for the development of ethics?1 And yet, it is telling that fifteen years ago, at an academic conference on gender, each moment of identity configuration , knowledge production, reading, critique, interpretation, and contestation would have been identified with the “political” rather than the “ethical.” Politics carried the same ubiquitous, overreaching, and underspecified place in humanities work now held by ethics. Then, the de-naturalizing, deessentializing and antifoundational moves of poststructuralism were mobilized to politicize everything: language, subjects, identities, readings, performances , and all social relations. Indeed, the governing assumption of critical work in the humanities was that anything not natural—and nothing was— was political. One might have worried then that such a relentless reach of the political produced at once its dilution and imperialism, and that this reach was perhaps also inattentive to constitutive features of the distinctive scene of powers binding and organizing human collectivities. Now, however, as the political has given way to the ethical in humanities discourse, it is the political that seems to have gone missing. Or, perhaps more precisely, what is often missing is the necessary connection between ethics and politics that thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Foucault taught us to sustain. There is much to be said for concerns with ethics, of course. More than the attitudinal demeanor or set of moral ideals to which it is sometimes reduced today, the ethical is fundamentally centered on action: it signals modes of conduct toward others and hence modes of being with others. Aristotle formulated ethics simply as good men acting in the pursuit of happiness in the rich Greek sense of eudamonia (a simplicity that evaporates, of course, as soon as action, goodness, humanness, and happiness are plumbed for their respective complexities). Moreover, given the capacity of ethics to reckon with distinctly human affective and expressive qualities that purely political logics frequently elide, ethics is an important partner to politically animated intellectual work. However, the virtues and importance of the...

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